Augustine remembers Clementia’s win
A picture of the Sacred Heart and a framed photograph of the three year-old gelding Clementia returning to scale after winning the Handicap Maiden Plate at Bassett on a certain day in January 1938 are the only decorations on the walls of the Killeatons’ house. The racing print shows a solitary horse guided proudly towards a gazing crowd by a jockey with Chinese features and a silken jacket that highlights on many ridges and creases a light that might have shone white and dazzling on the circuit of closely cut grass that stretches back to a distant belt of trees marking the southern boundary of the great system of plains that stretches northwards to the river-border of Victoria and still farther into southern New South Wales. The crowd waits, the sun hovers, and the Killeaton family sometimes glance at the line of trees, but no sign comes towards them from out of the north. Augustine often reproaches himself for not daring to hope on the morning of that race that Clementia, the horse from the north, the almost untried gelding whose weak legs he had treated for hours in buckets of melting ice, had it in him to stride home with his ears pricked ahead of a field that included half a dozen smart horses from Melbourne stables. The line of northern trees tells him nothing on that day as he watches his colours, green for his ancestors, silver for rain as filmy and delicate as the prayers he once sent floating off over paddocks by the sea, and a few bright inches of orange for his hopes of something portentous that might arrive one day from far inland, moving towards the start of the brief race that he does not know is his last chance for at least ten years to back a winner at the unbelievable odds of thirty-three to one. No camera records the progress of the race. The result is printed in small type inside the back pages of a few newspapers and on one of thousands of cards in the records of the Victoria Racing Club in Melbourne. Few of the two thousand people who watch the race remember for more than a month or so afterwards the astounding burst of speed that carried the outsider from near last to first. Only the connections of the narrowly beaten horses wonder occasionally during the following year what became of the bush horse that brought their plans unstuck on that hot day up north at Bassett. Harold Moy, himself scarcely realising what he has just done, brings back to scale the horse that should have been Killeaton’s greatest hope, that should have carried every penny of his savings and hundreds of pounds more that he could have borrowed from friends. Green and silver and orange come back triumphant from the unblinking north. Augustine Killeaton wins the race that he has waited all his life to win, and does not suspect that he may never win another. Colours too variable to fix in the memory have gathered at the edge of the northern plains, have run together into a thousand patterns that melted again as soon as they were formed, have assumed for an instant one fateful formation with his own device outstanding at its front, have massed themselves into a desperate gesture as if a finger pointed down from the north, and have scattered and will never again be assembled in that place.
The skeleton in the confessional
One afternoon the McCracken’s Road gang turns aside at the church gate instead of following the usual route home. Clement goes with them. The big boys whisper about some secret that has something to do with the church. Clement pesters them until they tell him that a woman’s skeleton is somewhere inside St Boniface’s church. They tiptoe into the church and pay their visit, kneeling in one of the back seats. They decide in whispers which of them will be the first to look. A boy creeps over to one of the confessionals and peeps into first one booth then the other. He comes back and says solemnly – they’ve taken her body away but you can still smell the dead smell. Another boy goes over and brings back the same report. While the other boys are searching around the baptistry and the crucifix corner for some sign of the dead woman, Clement hurries over to the confessional. He opens the door a few inches. A narrow shaft of sunlight reaches in ahead of him and picks out the last things the woman saw before she died – the smear of blood across the almost naked statue of Jesus hanging there to remind people that this is their last chance to be sorry for their sins, the close-set wires of the little grille, with thick grime around their meeting points, and all down one varnished wall a map of bare crumbling hillsides in a place like Palestine. As the boys leave the church Clement asks how the woman died. They tell him that she committed the worst of all mortal sins, the one that Our Lord said in the gospels would never be forgiven. She was going to try to get rid of it in confession but God or the Devil killed her before she could open her mouth. That night Clement asks his parents whether a woman really died in the confessional. They ask him what he knows about it. While he tells them some of the story that he has heard, his parents make faces at each other. Then his father says gently – no one has died in any confessional – a poor girl went out of her mind with worry and fainted while she was going to confession last Saturday night and now she’s getting better in a rest home – you can’t go to confession when you’re not in your proper mind. Clement asks where the rest home is. They tell him it is on the edge of a quiet little town near Melbourne. The girl looks out of her window at streets that tell her nothing about the district where she now lives or about the journey that she must make one day back to the dark confessional where no one will see her leaning her face against the mottled brownish hills from behind which the priest will come to tell her whether or not she was still in her mind when she committed that sin and, if she was, whether he has the power to forgive her, and where, if he says she was and neither he nor any other priest on earth can take away the sin, there may be no way she can save herself from hell, not even if she goes out of her mind again or goes away to some city beyond hills as impenetrable as the row upon row of sickly-coloured peaks that lead back from just behind her head to no apparent sky, because even though she never afterwards remembers Bassett she was still in her mind in that city where she first committed her sin. For many weeks the boys at St Boniface’s talk about the girl who died or went away, but no nun or priest ever mentions her. Clement tells other boys all he knows about her. Sometimes when he has made sure that no one is watching, he pays a visit and looks quickly into the confessional and wonders why in all those unexplored hills there is no place where someone might escape from a sin that was committed within the few gentle hills that thrust up through the dull surface of the city of Bassett.
Old Blue Nancy
When the children drifting out from St Boniface’s schoolyard into Fairbairn Street suddenly realise how much of the afternoon still remains and how little they might find to distract them behind the rotting picket fences of all the front yards, they look towards the gates of the church, hoping for a sight of Blue Nancy. Sometimes one of those children that the others dare not argue with points to an old lady, one of the many who live in the rows of old brick cottages between the church and the main streets of the city, and calls out – old Blue Nancy with blowflies in her pantsie, and starts to run as if the woman is chasing him. The other children squeal and claw at each other in their hurry to get away. They run for perhaps thirty yards along the footpath, calling out one of their rhymes – old Blue Nancy with maggots (her fingers, whiskers, her hankie, a dead cat, a stink bomb, lipstick, flea-bites, pepper, breadcrumbs, or soap-suds) in her pantsie, not caring whether the few grown-ups passing by overhear them. Sometimes Clement Killeaton runs with them, surprised to see how even the sweet-faced girlfriends or little sisters of the boys in the pack cry out without embarrassment the rude words of the rhymes. The children creep back a few yards to peer at the old woman. Many a time Clement is almost sure the woman is not the real Blue Nancy, or rather, not the woman he believes to be the real Blue Nancy and whom he once crept so close to that he is sure he would recognise her again. But someone calls out – Blue Nancy’s after us, and the children run off again, shrieking their rhymes. Sometimes when there is no old woman to be seen in all the street from the school to the Town Hall, a group of children, with Clement following them timidly, gathers on the footpath outside a certain house with d
rawn blinds and a tiny front yard full of dark leaves of arum lilies. One of the bravest boys pushes open the front gate, runs up to the front window, and raps on the glass until Clement is sure it must smash. Then the boy strolls back so slowly that the girls gasp at his courage. The children stand ready to run, but no sound comes from inside the house. Sometimes when Mrs Linahan from the shop nearby comes out to scold them, the children scatter as if Blue Nancy herself was after them, because Mrs Linahan is a spy for the nuns and sometimes comes to St Boniface’s school to identify children who have misbehaved in the streets. At other times the leading boys stuff dirt and rubbish from the gutter or the dried turd of a dog or even lighted spills of paper through the slot marked LETTERS in the door. During all the years while the children of St Boniface’s school claim to live in terror of Blue Nancy, Clement keeps trying to find out more about her. He never finds a boy who knows the whole story or who was present on the famous afternoon when Blue Nancy dragged a child screaming into her house and kept it prisoner until after dark and did filthy things to it. But all the different stories that he hears about Blue Nancy are so similar that he never doubts that there is such a woman, although he suspects that she may not live in the house with the lilies in the front yard. He often expects her to spring out at him from the shadowy corners at the back of the church or from the overgrown thickets in the corner of the churchyard where the former Bishops of Northern Victoria are supposed to be buried. Clement regrets that he was not privileged to be one of the children who saw Blue Nancy a few years before, when she was doing the deeds that made her famous. Yet he is never sure just who those children are. Just when he believes he has found one who was in the church on a certain afternoon when Blue Nancy attacked a group of children making the stations of the cross and herded them into a corner and spat at them like a cat, he learns that it was really an older brother or sister of that child, or another child who has since left St Boniface’s. He pays many visits to the church in the hope of tempting her to show herself. He knows that every Sunday Blue Nancy goes to three or four Masses at St Boniface’s and even to communion at each Mass, although this is forbidden, and that she dresses all in blue for Our Lady, although her clothes are so dirty that they could not possibly please Our Blessed Mother. She has been seen coming back from the communion rails munching on the Host, which is a shocking thing, but no one dares try to stop her. One rainy afternoon when she was too lazy to go out of the church to the lavatory she left a great pile of shit in a corner of a confessional and several inches of piss in the baptismal font. When she pays a visit she prays aloud in a voice that carries all through the church, and mentions the names of children in her prayers, asking God to make their Tommies turn black or drop off. Sometimes when Clement takes another boy with him on an afternoon visit to the Blessed Sacrament he sees an old lady loitering near the altar-rails or even changing the flowers on the altar itself and whispers to his friend – it’s Blue Nancy isn’t it? But the other boy only says – don’t be stupid it’s nothing like her. One day after he and a group of children have left the veranda of Blue Nancy’s house covered in scribble and the letter slot stuffed with horse dung, Clement calls at the church to pay a visit. He walks alone around a corner of the building and buries his face in a cushion of dusty dark-blue stuff speckled with fluff and festooned with long white hairs. As the old lady thrusts him away from her belly he looks up and sees a wrinkled face wrapped in a long blue woollen scarf and topped with a blue hat with blue feathers. The woman’s sunken mouth works rapidly as if she is chewing on something. Clement’s legs go weak from fear. He runs down Fairbairn Street and keeps running all along Cordwainer Street. Next day he boasts to a few boys that Blue Nancy grabbed him outside the church and tried to put her hand up the leg of his trousers, but no one takes much notice of his story. As weeks pass he feels brave enough to go back each afternoon to the church and look for the old woman in blue, but he never sees her again. Sometimes when he is alone he doubts whether it was the real Blue Nancy after all, but whenever he is with a group of children on an oppressive afternoon and one of them starts to chant – old Blue Nancy with a pisspot in her pantsie, and he sees far along the hot dreary street the vague figure of an old lady, he joins eagerly in their game because he recognises the true Blue Nancy who might have killed him if he had not escaped from her clutches one afternoon at the church.
Clement learns why a girl nearly died at confession
One morning when some of the boys at St Boniface’s school are talking about Blue Nancy and someone tells how he saw her the other night creeping out of the same confessional where the skeleton of the dead woman used to be, and someone else says that Blue Nancy probably had something to do with murdering the dead girl, and the others wait for someone to say that she certainly did and that he knows the true story of it, a boy named Alfie Brancatella, who seldom smiles or sees the point of any joke or tells a story that anyone is willing to listen to, announces solemnly that he knows all about the girl who nearly died in the confessional because she is a friend of his auntie. Nobody stops to listen, but Clement waits until the other boys have gone and then asks Alfie to tell him the story. Alfie Brancatella says that his mother went to visit his Auntie Teresa and his Auntie Teresa knows a lady in her street who is looking after the girl whose name is Stella because Stella got sick and had to go to Melbourne but she is a lot better now and she might be getting a baby soon. Clement asks where the girl Stella lives. Alfie says probably near his auntie’s place 22 Jasmine Street Cornishtown past where the Cornishtown trams stop and turn around. Clement tries to learn what really happened that night in confession, but the boy only says that his auntie says it was nothing to make a fuss about and Stella only wanted to find a place where people wouldn’t be nasty to her or her little baby. Alfie promises to tell Clement if the girl ever has a baby and to find out where she goes to live if ever she leaves Cornishtown. On a hill that looks northwards away from Bassett towards the useless grey mounds and scoured gullies across which the ironbark forests are slowly making their way back into Cornishtown, a girl who may never be able to go to confession again sits during the long afternoons trying to make out a vista that she might point to when her baby grows up and say – that’s the sort of country that will have to satisfy you in place of the hills like Palestine’s that I once saw blazing all across the wall on the last afternoon that I ever went to church or where we may have to go away together like dingoes searching for a place where no one has ever heard about mortal sins or which may turn out to be your punishment because you will stare at it for years and still not understand why everything is so grey and quiet because it is no use telling you that there might have been other hills far away for you to look at.
Tamarisk Row Page 10